News and Announcements

March 20, 2011: Dr. Paula Szkody, University of Washington, has requested our help in monitoring the cataclysmic variable GW Lib for upcoming Hubble Space Telescope observations, scheduled to be made during the week of 2011 April 7-11 UT. Dr. Szkody also observed this object with HST inMarch 2010 (see AAVSO Alert Notice 417).

Observer Challenges

The Twenty Million and Counting! Contest is over now that the database has passed this milestone. The winner, with the prediction closest to the actual day of the milestone was Christopher Watson of San Diego, California.

A new version of VStar has just been released, and along with it, a plugin that will allow you to upload data to plot in the AAVSO Extended File Format. Which means... you can now view your data as output by VPHOT.

February 25, 2011: Dr. Paula Szkody (University of Washington) has requested our help in monitoring the cataclysmic variable SDSS074545 (SDSS J074531.91+453829.5) for upcoming Hubble Space Telescope observations. The HST observations are scheduled to be made during the week of 2011 March 7-14. Dr. Szkody also observed this object with HST in October-November 2007 (see AAVSO Alert Notice 359).

The 2009 Landolt UBVRI Equatorial Standard Fields are being added to VSP. Descriptions of all the fields are included in the tables below. In order to plot them you need to enter the coordinates and size of the field you want.

On Feburary 19, 2011 the number of observations in the AAVSO International Database surpassed the 20 million mark. It is fitting that this milestone was achieved during our 100th anniversary. Below is some information about the achievement.

A milestone anniversary and a joint meeting with the AAS!

May 21-26, 2011
Boston, MA

Some observers in the chat room are reporting that their observations submitted since November 11, 2010 are not showing up in our online tools. Doc and Matt will investigate this first thing in the morning (eastern) and update this page when they know more information. We apologize for this inconvenience.

February 1, 2011: Sumner Starrfield (Arizona State University) has informed us that Chandra is currently observing the cataclysmic variable T Pyx. He and his colleagues would like supporting optical monitoring of the star during the visitation. One visit is happening now; the next and final visit will occur on February 5 (UT).